Is it wise to kick Te Pukenga to touch after $200m spend?
“The fatal flaw that we tried to point out to the Minister is nobody overseas knows what a Te Pukenga is."
Ten… That appears to be a likely number of autonomous polytechnics under a potential National-led Government post-October.
The National Party has stated publicly that it plans to disestablish the centralised Te Pukenga organisation if elected in October. The organisation and name would be scrapped.
Te Pukenga was formed following the merger of 16 New Zealand polytechnics. Included in the merger is the Invercargill-based Southern Institute of Technology.
Invercargill MP - and former long-time SIT CEO - Penny Simmonds is the National Party’s tertiary education spokesperson.
National is yet to release its tertiary education policy but Simmonds has reaffirmed the party’s plan to disestablish Te Pukenga.
However, Simmonds has told The Tribune she did not see a return to 16 polytechnics.
“Some are too small to be viable. I’m picking it would be around about 10 polytechnics,” Simmonds said.
“We would have to work through that with the various polytechnics whether they see geographic mergers or smaller ones sitting under larger ones. It’s just what is going to make sense.”
Simmonds confirmed they would return autonomy back to the individual polytechnics, although there would be some parts where centralisation still made sense, she said.
“It makes sense to have the ITOs staying centralised within there, so there is seamless movement between the ITOs and the polytechnics.
“There might be some back-office things like quality assurance and regulatory compliance that could be centralised and then fed out to the individual polytechnics.”
Although the marketing of the polytechnics would return to each polytechnic under National.
The SIT has previously been particularly aggressive in its quest to attract international students to the Southland region.
Simmonds is keen to see that return with the disestablishment of Te Pukenga.
“The fatal flaw that we tried to point out to the Minister is nobody overseas knows what a Te Pukenga is. They know what a university is, they know what a polytechnic is, they know what a college is, but they don’t know what a Te Pukenga is.
“We’ve really got to allow the polytechnics - that have had good marketing strategies for their polytechnics and for their region - to be out there aggressively marketing for international students.
“Not hampered by this centralised marketing of an entity that nobody understands what it is.”
There has been a massive amount of resource, both financially and time, poured into establishing Te Pukenga by the current Government.
The branding work alone has been, and continues to be, a massive exercise.
Is scrapping it all now and kicking Te Pukenga to touch, before it really has started, a wise move? Is it really the best financial move for the country and sector at this point?
Simmonds believes so.
“They have spent over $200m to get to this point, but they put in a business case to the Government that over the next ten years they need just under another billion dollars to make it work to unify their IT systems and academic programmes.
“The Government balked at that and has given them, for the next year, $220m in a loan. But essentially it isn’t set up in a state that it can operate sensibly.
“Yes, there has already been about $200m spent, but if it can’t operate without about another billion then you can’t keep pouring money into it with the hope that it might work.”
And how long would this realistically take to scrap what has already been put in place and return to largely autonomous polytechnics?
“We would be moving very quickly on it and there would certainly be major changes in place for 2024 and looking to have it finalised by the end of 2024.”
To muddy the waters further Te Pukenga is currently in the midst of a significant staffing restructure.
Te Pukenga has previously announced plans to cut about 400 jobs and that process was still being worked through.
It’s understood that affected people were going to be made aware of the outcome by the end of August but that had now been pushed out to September 18 - less than a month before the election.
Would Penny have said people knew what an ‘Ara’ was beforehand?